How to approach the issue of climate breakdown in art? To do so obliquely risks minimising its urgency, but go head-on and you risk hectoring or slipping into cliche. In its UK premiere, Julia Wolfe’s oratorio unEarth ultimately tilted towards the latter, although it made some striking impressions on the way.
Produced by Wolfe’s collective Bang on a Can, unEarth was first performed in 2023 in New York. Wolfe developed some of its text with a local youth choir, who sang in the premiere. Here it was the Finchley Children’s Music Group on stage, ranged behind the BBCSO and conductor Martyn Brabbins along with the men of the BBC Singers and National Youth Voices. All sang from memory, and all were amplified – as was Else Torp, singing a solo line in a lean high soprano that dovetailed into the orchestral sounds.
While the singers had moved around in the premiere, here they stayed put, largely leaving the visual spectacle to Lucy Mackinnon’s projections on to a circular screen hanging moonlike over the stage, the music working evocatively with and against the images. When the men sang lines from the Book of Genesis about the annihilation wrought by the Flood, and the night-sky imagery turned to waves and water, the rain arrived violently, the violins ricocheting their bows on the strings. The second movement began with the men singing “tree” in dozens of languages, each word a small, sudden shot of life; these built into cross-rhythms that had the wind players almost dancing in their seats, backed by teeming imagery of plants and fungus.
But the final movement, with teenagers staring from the screen and the children on stage intoning lines including “I take the bus”: this felt preachy, as did the list of climate-science buzzwords sung in thudding syllables by the men. Was it meant to suggest the futility of well-meaning actions? Is this another case of putting the onus on children to fix an older generation’s mess?
Whatever the answer, it felt heavy-handed – especially given that in the first half of the concert we had heard Copland’s Appalachian Spring. With its beguilingly simple clarinet and flute solos, and its punchy rhythms springing up like unstoppable green shoots, Copland’s score seemed an effortless paean to nature’s resilience.
• On BBC Radio 3 on 12 February, then on BBC Sounds for 30 days.
